Coup still scars Guatemalans 50 years later / Anniversary recalls civil war that sent half-million to U.S.

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, June 26, 2004

Image 1of/1

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 1

Josu� Revolorio, here with his daughter Renee at her Berkeley school, saw friends taken away and later found dead in the street. Chronicle photo by Michael Maloney

Josu� Revolorio, here with his daughter Renee at her Berkeley school, saw friends taken away and later found dead in the street. Chronicle photo by Michael Maloney

Coup still scars Guatemalans 50 years later / Anniversary recalls civil war that sent half-million to U.S.

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

Fifty years later, the effects of a U.S.-orchestrated coup d'etat that toppled Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz are still reverberating, not only in Central America but also in the Bay Area.

Berkeley resident Josué Revolorio, 41, was not yet born at the time of the coup of June 27, 1954, but the decades of military dictatorship that followed took a painful toll on his life. As a student activist in the capital of Guatemala City, Revolorio saw friends hauled away by soldiers or shadowy death squads, then saw their lifeless, mutilated bodies dumped in the street as a warning to others like himself.

"The practice of kidnapping and torture began after the coup, and land for the peasants was taken away," said Revolorio, who still suffers from bouts of depression. "People started to speak up about it, and they were called communists and terrorists as a justification for killing them. The space for debating politics closed up."

Revolorio is one of more than half a million Guatemalans in the United States, according to a 2002 report by the Pew Hispanic Center using U.S. census data. Most of them were displaced by a 36-year civil war that lasted until 1996 and claimed the lives of 200,000 Guatemalans, the majority of them civilians.

The Bay Area has a Guatemalan community of roughly 20,000, and countless numbers of them still carry the scars of the brutal counterinsurgency campaign that peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In Oakland, a Guatemalan named Jesús recalled the day in 1982 when he and his family fled for their lives as the army burned their village and killed cowering women and children, including his wife's relatives, as part of a scorched-earth campaign meant to root out support for anti-government guerrillas active in the area.

With his family, Jesús -- still so fearful of reprisal that he would not give his last name -- survived in the jungle for more than a year, then made his way to a refugee camp in Mexico. He came to the United States in 1996 and received political asylum two years later. He has never returned to Guatemala.

"My family was completely broken apart by the war," he said, taking a break from the gardening job that supports his parents, wife and children, who are still in Mexico. "The violence has had grave consequences. We're still suffering from it, even now."

UC Berkeley anthropologist Beatriz Manz has studied Guatemala for three decades and this year published "Paradise in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror and Hope," a book about Jesús' village, Santa María Tzejá. It was established in the northern rain forest in 1970 by land-starved Mayan peasants, who cleared the terrain with axes and machetes.

"Sixteen years before the trees were cut in the Ixcán rain forest, the CIA-backed coup strangled all possibilities of land reform in the country," she said. "The very creation of these villages in the remote, impenetrable jungle are linked to the United States."

Ironically, Manz said, the violent upheaval of the civil war, which also had U.S. backing, ultimately led many Guatemalans north to this country.

"Once they were uprooted, once they had moved to the jungle, then to refugee camps in Chiapas (Mexico), then further to camps in Campeche, it was just another step to come to the U.S.," she said. "It's not like the situation of other immigrants who have come here for primarily economic reasons."

The coup, 50 years ago Sunday, ended the 10-year "October revolution" that had begun in 1944 under President Juan José Arévalo and ushered in democratic reforms, improved education, labor rights and an agrarian reform plan, according to the well-documented history.

In a country where, in 1950, 2 percent of the landowners controlled 70 percent of the nation's arable land, Arbenz set out to redistribute large parcels of idle land to a desperate peasantry. In his inaugural speech, he vowed "to convert Guatemala from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist state."

That plan did not sit well with the Boston-based United Fruit Co., which was Guatemala's largest landowner and had been accustomed to operating with a free hand in Central America.

In their definitive history, "Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala," authors Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer describe the close collaboration between United Fruit executives and leaders in the Eisenhower administration that led the United States to oust Arbenz's left- leaning government.

In the context of the Cold War, the coup was seen as a strike against Soviet expansionism, although there was scant evidence of Soviet influence in Guatemala, according to Schlesinger and Kinzer.

Even experts at the conservative Hoover Institution acknowledge that the policy dictated by Cold War ideology was not good for the people of Guatemala.

"It was part of a larger alliance at the time to contain communism," said Stephen Haber, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. "The people carrying out these policies had good motivations. ... They really had this belief that they had to fight communism around the world, and it took us into all kinds of adventures that, looking back, might not have been wise."

The coup, which the CIA dubbed "Operation PBSuccess," installed Col. Carlos Castillo Armas as president and was deemed by Eisenhower administration officials to be a triumphant covert operation. It became a model for future interventions, including the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the 1965 U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic, according to internal CIA documents.

A CIA history of the Guatemala operation, declassified in 1997, criticized the coup plotters for their shoddy planning and noted that the ouster of Arbenz triggered ferocious international protests against the United States.

On top of that, wrote CIA historian Nicholas Cullather, "Castillo Armas' new regime proved embarrassingly inept. Its repressive and corrupt policies soon polarized Guatemala and provoked a renewed civil conflict."

Castillo Armas reversed the land reform, voided the constitution and outlawed political parties and labor unions -- actions that paved the way for the emergence, around 1960, of an armed guerrilla opposition. In response, the United States sent military advisers to train the Guatemalan army in counterinsurgency tactics akin to those used in Vietnam.

"Without the coup, there wouldn't have been a civil war in Guatemala," said Susanne Jonas, a professor of Latin American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. "But beyond Guatemala itself, I think the whole region could have avoided the wars of the 1980s if this hadn't happened."

Jonas contends that if the reforms of Arévalo and Arbenz had been allowed to go forward, they might have served as a model for gradual social democratic changes in Central America, which was dominated by landowning elites and the military.

Haber, the Hoover fellow, disagrees.

"Well before the United States took an interest, Central American countries had very unequal distributions of wealth. That wasn't a creation of U.S. foreign policy," said Haber. But he added, "You'd be hard-pressed to argue that we improved, in the long run, the standard of living, both political and economic, for the Guatemalan population by overthrowing Arbenz."

Though the 1954 coup now seems remote, for many Guatemalans in the Bay Area its legacy lingers in the memories of the terrifying violence that erupted during the later civil war decades.

"It's a wound that never closes," Revolorio said. "I ask myself, 'Why did I survive?' I have a family, a daughter, and my wife is expecting another child. My friends didn't have that opportunity."

Mynor Andrade, the host of a weekly Guatemalan radio program on KIQI, 1010 AM, said the anguish many refugees still carry with them has alienated Guatemalans from each other. He said he began the radio program to try to bridge the gap.

"We need to unify the community," said Andrade, who fled his homeland in 1989 after he was threatened by the army for teaching about computers in rural areas. "What people need is information: about Guatemala, about life here in the United States, about how to find medical insurance or child care or English classes. We're missing a kind of fraternal support."

Adding to the difficulties, most Guatemalans in this country have not been granted political asylum in spite of the persecution they fled.

"Between that insecurity and the fears you keep in your mind about what happened (during the war), people feel a tremendous anxiety," Manz said. "It's a constant, 24-hour-a-day sense of vulnerability that they bring with them here."

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.